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Jaguars, like most teams, play it cool at trading deadline

Mike Thomas was traded Tuesday to the Detroit Lions - the Jaguars' next opponent.

Never satisfied with the amount of attention paid to the NFL, owners and players agreed last spring to move the trade deadline back two weeks to late October.

The original date was Tuesday, but Hurricane Sandy forced the league to add another 48 hours so the new deadline is Thursday at 4 p.m.

Not that it will matter to most of the teams.

Whereas “Deadline Day” produces blanket coverage in baseball, hockey and basketball, it’s Just Another Day for NFL teams.

Players had their usual Tuesday off and coaches began game planning for their next opponent.

“I haven’t put a lot of thought into that,” Jaguars coach Mike Mularkey said with a laugh after his news conference on Monday. “I knew it was [Tuesday]. I wasn’t aware of them moving it [to Thursday].”

The Jaguars’ 1-6 record is tied with Kansas City and Carolina for the worst in NFL. They need help at several positions.

Something happened on Tuesday — the Jaguars shipped receiver Mike Thomas to the Detroit Lions (who they host on Sunday) for a draft pick.

Thomas had fallen behind Laurent Robinson (before his injury), Cecil Shorts and Justin Blackmon in the Jaguars’ receiver pecking order. He had 13 catches for 80 yards in seven games this year.

A team philosophyThe Jaguars’ front office philosophy is to answer every call because alienating a team might jeopardize a future trade discussion.

Including the Thomas trade, the Jaguars have made 57 trades — 41 before training camp, 12 during the preseason and four during the regular season.

The previous three in-season trades came in 1996 (a sixth-round pick to Tampa Bay for defensive end Regan Upshaw), 2005 (a seventh-round pick to San Francisco for linebacker Jamie Winborn) and 2010 (safety Anthony Smith to Green Bay; Smith didn’t meet the conditions for a seventh-round pick so the Jaguars received nothing back).

The Thomas-to-Detroit deal is among the type of trades made at the deadline — a player who isn’t getting a lot of playing time is traded.

Detroit hasn’t made a deadline trade since 2008, when it fleeced Dallas for first-, third-, fifth- and seventh-round draft picks in the Roy Williams deal.

“There’s not a day that goes by that we don’t think about a different way to improve our team,” coach Jim Schwartz told Detroit reporters on Monday. “I think that [general manager Martin Mayhew] has been very strong in what he’s said consistently over time — there’s no finish line when it comes to personnel and any path that we can take to improve our team, we’re certainly willing to look at.”

Reasons for tradesAccording to industry insiders, there are several factors for the lack of trades:

- Job security (or lack of). The Jaguars are a prime example. Even if they were offered a great deal for a core player, what would be the message sent by sacrificing even 1-2 wins for a likely mid-round draft pick? The White Flag Plan doesn’t work in pro football.

- Compensatory draft picks. Teams won’t dump an impending unrestricted free agent just for the sake of dumping him. Teams receive a draft pick if they lose a player via free agency during the off-season.

- The new flexibility of draft-day trades. Last April, there were 19 trades in the first round. The new rookie wage scale makes teams more willing to hold onto their mid- and late-round picks to use as collateral to trade up in round 1.

- Common sense. A player is usually available because of an age, medical or character issue.

In 2010-11, there were 52 non-draft weekend trades in the NFL. Two years ago, nine of the 35 were in-season and last year, four of the 17 came after Week 1.

Marshawn Lynch, Randy Moss and Deion Branch highlighted the 2010 deals and last year, the blockbuster was Carson Palmer going from Cincinnati to Oakland.

Other sportsCompare that to the other three major American team sports and its last three Deadline Days.

On Feb. 27, there were 17 trades in the NHL, which was viewed as a tame day because so many teams felt they remained in playoff contention.

Two weeks later, on March 15, nine trades were made by NBA teams, but most were teams dumping expiring or big contracts or contending teams adding a role player.

And in the weeks between baseball’s All-Star Game and the July 31 non-waiver deadline, 31 trades were completed. MLB’s extra layer — an additional month of time as long as the player clears waivers, produced 11 deals, including the blockbuster Dodgers-Red Sox agreement that shipped Carl Crawford, Adrian Gonzalez and Josh Beckett to Los Angeles.

NFL teams like the Jaguars scour the waiver wire, practice squads and the street for in-season additions. Since their 53-man roster was set, the Jaguars have made 39 moves to the roster and practice squad. Included were signing Maurice Stovall, Chris Harris and Micheal Spurlock, street free agents who weren’t with the Jaguars in training camp.